On Mintaka
29 April 2017
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Mountains, Northern Pakistan, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The ‘exclusive’ traverse
09 May 2016
First things first. I wrote my requiem last year in August when I wept on the Mintaka Pass in Gojal. I had walked up unfit after a full year of living without a jot of exercise. To add to that, I had developed, right on the first day of the trek, the most horridly lurid blisters on both feet. I wept when I read on the crest of the pass how fit Peter Fleming had felt coming up from the Tashkurghan side. Sono (Rahman) Aunty called to say I had brought tears to her eyes and that I couldn’t give up so quickly. So, even without trying, I did not give up.
This year I returned to Shimshal after twenty years to walk to the summer pasture of Shuwert doing some work for Pakistan Petroleum Ltd. I was not prospecting for oil, though. Back in July 1990, with much less flab on the body and much more hair on the pate, I had done a traverse from Askole to Shimshal by the Biafo-Sim Gang-Braldu glacier system. Having crossed the 5700 metre-high Lukpe La, I became the first Pakistani to have done this traverse.
Labels: Mintaka, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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On my way back from Mintaka Pass
12 May 2013
The best way to go is by one’s own shanks or one’s own wheels. Riding camels, donkeys, horses what have you is unnatural business: if Nature had meant humans to ride these creatures, She would have fitted the beasts with handle bars. On a bicycle the handle bar lets you steer quickly this way or that and you can hold on to it in order to prevent a fall in case someone knocks against you or if you have to brake very hard.
You can hardly tell that inside these boots I have bleeding feet
But what is a flimsy bridle? It cannot keep the rider steady. It cannot prevent a fall and I have never been able to figure out how polo players and other equestrian experts bloody well stay in the freaking saddle.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Mountains, Northern Pakistan, Travel
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Hill Walker’s Requiem
10 May 2013
If nightfall is the hour of the ebbing of the spirit, dawn rejuvenates. At shortly after four, I peeked out of my tent to see a glorious star-studded sky with a hint of a pastel dawn in the east. The agonising chafing of my blisters with every single step yesterday was forgotten and I was ready to press on in my quest of Mintaka Pass. The Killik was no longer within my reach, that much I knew with certainty.
An hour later I roused my young companions. Irfan and Amanullah had slept in the shepherd’s hut of Murkushi and word was that it was infested with cockroaches. As they cooked dinner, they had seen the creatures crawling about the walls and into the many holes between the stones. One of the trio from Misgar that had joined us the previous evening had baked a loaf of bread and left it in the pot uncovered. In the morning it was found crawling with virtually hundreds of those horrid insects.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Mountains, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Walking history’s highway
29 April 2013
I hobbled across the floor of large shattered rocks, the remnants of a glacier past, and painfully hauled myself over the low saddle behind which my two companions had disappeared only shortly before. Then I saw it, the object of a long-held desire: the concrete pillar that marks the Mintaka Pass between China and Pakistan.
The meadows on the way to Morkushi
But I could not believe I was actually there. For one, as we came up to the last bit of glacial remains, my guide Irfanullah had said that the boundary pillar lay about an hour away. Secondly, I had imagined the pillar to be much taller. Why, it marked the boundary between two countries and ought to be of monumental proportions, yet as it was, the column was just about the height of a man, a metre and seventy centimetres. Having caught sight of it, it was not without a good deal of gratitude that I trudged the last painful steps to the crest of the pass.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mintaka: ancient byway into the subcontinent
26 April 2013
Sitting at the head of Misgar Valley (Gojal, north of Hunza), the 4760 metre-high Mintaka Pass has one of the most evocative and tantalising names: in the Wakhi language, it is the Pass of a Thousand Ibex. Sometime in the latter Middle Ages, the Wakhi people who speak an archaic form of Persian came down this way from Tajikistan and Wakhan to make the valleys of Gojal their home. Their hunters’ instinct would have been greatly titillated by the sight of herds of Himalayan ibex browsing on the slopes around them and they gave the high, wind-swept saddle a name that stuck.
The Wakhi tribes were not the first comers on Mintaka, however. Nearly a millennium and a half before them, in the latter half of the 2nd century BCE, a great horde of horse-riding northern peoples followed their leader down this pass on their way to become masters of much of modern-day Pakistan. The chief was called Maues and his people were the Scythians. Driven out of their home by drought and the pressure of a more powerful tribe, they sought the fertile plains of the Indus Valley whose fame by this time had spread far.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 01:00,
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